Description

We really miss a high level architecture overview of MediaWiki core and platform extensions (the ones that provide APIs and enable user features). Reasons to have one:

MediaWiki and relatives form a very complex family. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers lists 210 components only for core, and there is no subdivision to be seen. Without a shared high level map it is a lot more complex to have shared high level discussions and plans.

New potential contributors need an overview to understand the basics of MediaWiki and find the area where they want to work on. Such diagram would be really helpful to identify an area as a starting point. After many conversations with many newcomers with different skill levels, we know that most of them get simply lost / overwhelmed in their first contact.

Defining areas is a premise required to discuss whether we want to have architects / owners / maintainers for a specific area that would work with the TechCom or be part of it.

@Aklapper and I discussed this and T115852 briefly. It seems the best short- to mid-term fix is update https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers to add Architectural area and WMF team columns and make it sortable. To provide the overview without scrolling through the table, there could be table rows for each architectural area that show up in the TOC, or perhaps there's a way to have collapsible subsections of a sortable table.

This project is selected for the Developer-Wishlist voting round and will be added to a MediaWiki page very soon. To the subscribers, or proposer of this task: please help modify the task description: add a brief summary (10-12 lines) of the problem that this proposal raises, topics discussed in the comments, and a proposed solution (if there is any yet). Remember to add a header with a title "Description," to your content. Please do so before February 5th, 12:00 pm UTC.

The work on defining stewards for each item will help, but I think we'll need to evolve the developer/maintainers page some more to make it more consumable. Even with the changes that have been made to the page and the identification of stewards, I think it will still fall short of addressing the pain points that are identified.